Posted on 05/28/2005 11:20:41 AM PDT by Destro
05/28/2005
Southern Yankees Embrace Civil War History
By KRISTEN WYATT, Associated Press Writer
21 minutes ago
ATLANTA - Eric Peterson is a rarity among Civil War buffs — he's a Yankee. Peterson lives just eight miles from the route his great-great grandfather took during the war through what is now suburban Atlanta, but his ancestor was a Union soldier from Wisconsin, not a gray-coated rebel.
He formed a new Sons of Union Veterans camp in Georgia, and said his group is growing because of northerners moving South and taking a new interest.
"It's far more immediate than it was in Wisconsin," said Peterson, whose camp will decorate the graves of Union soldiers in Atlanta on Monday. "There were no battles there. Here the history is all around us."
As Civil War history groups prepare for Memorial Day events across the South, they're bumping into more and more fellow Civil War buffs from the North.
Larry Blumatte of Pittsboro, N.C., moved from Pennsylvania in 1986 and now belongs to the Sons of the Union Veterans and the Sons of Confederate Veterans. He traces ancestors who fought on both sides and said many native Southerners would be surprised to learn how much Union heritage they may have.
"The vogue down here is to be Confederate. But once people find out how much Union heritage there is, they get interested," said Blumatte, whose camp will lay wreaths on Union graves Monday in New Bern, N.C.
The Sons of the Union Veterans is still tiny in the South compared to the Confederate group. Georgia, for example, has one camp on the Union side and 106 for the Sons of Confederate Veterans.
At least one Southern culture expert can't believe that Union groups have sprung up where effects from the war are still felt.
"I'm absolutely flabbergasted," said Walter Edgar, director of the Institute for Southern Studies at the University of South Carolina. "A lot of transplants I know have tried to become as Southern as they can."
Besides Georgia and North Carolina, there are Sons of the Union Veterans camps in Alabama and Florida, with one maybe coming soon in Louisiana.
"There's even some interest in South Carolina," where the war began, said Steve Michaels, commander-in-chief for the group, which counts 6,800 members nationwide.
The group sometimes works with the Sons of the Confederate Veterans on school visits or re-enactments. They have a similar interest in preserving battlefields and gravesites, and dozens of people belong to both.
In fact, actual Union veterans and Confederate veterans were known to hold reunions after the war.
"Some of them would gather after the war even then," said Jack Bridwell, head of the Sons of the Confederate Veterans in Georgia, adding that he isn't surprised that some Yankees take greater interest in the Civil War after moving South.
"In the South, the war hurt us. We were the ones that bled. The history of the 'War of Northern Aggression' is still alive here, so I can see why it would pique their interest," he said.
Union descendants living in the South doubt they'll ever match the numbers, or passion, of their Confederate colleagues. Up North, they explain, the Civil War just isn't as big a deal.
"There were far more Union troops in the war than there were Confederate, but it's a different kind of thing," said Gerald Leonard, a Sons of the Confederate Veterans camp commander in Temple Terrace, Fla., who grew up in Connecticut. "Maybe it's because we won the war."
___
On the Net:
Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War: http://suvcw.org
Sons of Confederate Veterans: http://www.scv.org
Good, because our guys HATE playing the Union soldiers during reenactments.
8-)
)))ping(((
if I were God , the South would have won.....
Right.
Union dead, American Civil War: ~364,000
Confederate dead, American Civil War: ~260,000
The new Carpetbaggers.
FR Dixie Ping!
That's a real damnyankee thing to say. There is nothing "vogue" about honoring our ancestors - that's just what you do. It's not trendy, or new. It's not the latest craze, it's a part of Southern life.
This isn't news, after the war numerous Grand Army Posts popped around the South. Many were Unionists who served in regiments recruited in the South, others were blacks who served in the USCT regiments, and finally, many were Union soldiers who fell in love with the South or sought economic opportunites after the war. The town of Fitzgerald, Georgia, was founded by Union soldiers. By and large they were welcomed with open arms so long as they did not come on political missions.
I wonder what the percentage of population that amounted to, though.
A Copperhead! We're grateful for your support.
Like somebody else said, I'd love to see those numbers as percentages of casualties, not just raw totals. And, this is something I'm not sure about, but is there any reliable estimate as to how many Confederate civilians died during the WBTS?
}:-)4
But the yankees would say it was done for our own good. Right...
Basically, yeah. Considering that so much of the war was fought on Southern soil, I'm curious if there are any reliable estimates as to civilian casualties. Civilian casualties didn't reach the genocidal levels of, say, the Eastern Front in WWII, but I'm sure there had to be a significant number of Southern non-combatants (or irregulars, perhaps) that died either due to direct combat, or perhaps due to the effects of things like Sheridan's 1864 Shenendoah Valley campaign, or Sherman's March to the Sea.
And I'm sure there were some in Union and unincorporated territories as well...thinking about some of those vicious guerilla wars in Kansas.
}:-)4
If the Redlegs had stayed out of Missouri, there wouldn't have been much if any carnage in Kansas. Had the Union played fair in Missouri, there wouldn't have been a guerilla war in Missouri.
Some of the Confederadoes visited Georgia in the 1970s to do genealogical research. A friend of mine met them and being something of a linguist found them fascinating for they had unwittingly preserved many of the speech patterns and saying that their ancestors took with them to South America. Much of their lingo contained Scots-Irish phrases.
7-8 years ago, we were in Charleston for a convention, so of course I took my son, then around 11, to Fort Sumter, and Fort Moultrie, one of the forts from which Sumter was bombarded.
At Moultrie, there was a Civil War reenactment group drilling, so my son got a close look at their gear, and especially a percussion cap rifled musket, thanks to the nice guys from that unit.
Oh, yeah, there were a couple black guys in the unit, and they were a Yankee reenactment unit, which is unsurprising, given that first bit.
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